The fond reliability of autocraft

Dearest reader,

I sit here in Pleasant Blends, considering the many wonders we as humans get to experience with the influence of cars in our lives. It's been largely held that the phenomenon of suburban life has come about almost solely because of cars, we're able to have all sorts of food and drink in any part of the world partly due to cars (and boats and planes, but today we're focusing on cars). And yes, I'm including shipping trucks in the general umbrella of cars, so automobiles may be a more appropriate term, but I'm going to stick with cars for the purpose of my point. Cars give us the ability to book our daily schedules to their fullest extreme without giving extended thought to travel time. We are able to feel connected to extended families and friends who live hundreds or even thousands of miles away, we can also distance ourselves based on these reasons as well. A new, miniature rite of passage has grown into our mainstream society when a teenager first obtains his or her driver's license. Life can be made so much easier because we can just jump in the car to get the last missing ingredient to bake cookies, or buy new batteries when the smoke detector starts its beeping. Restaurants and coffee houses have moved into a fast food age based largely around the concept of the drive through. Even families themselves can at times be strengthened or weakened because of bonding during family road trips.

These are all pretty obvious things that come to mind for me when I think of how my life is different than it would have been if I lived in a time or society where cars were nonexistent. But cars have a different, almost magical power in my life as well as these phenomenal social realities. For me, a given car has a way of changing its relability factor just when I am relying on it enough to change my plans on the whole. When it does this, the reliability the given car only ever changes enough to make me consider changing the course of my short-term life at first, not becoming unreliable enough to decide to terminate the current plan and create entirely new plans. Instead, the reliability of the car dwindles just slightly, disintigrating the situation into a sort of frozen ambiguity, a purgatory of automotive-travel-based planning. This situation lets up and reveals its true reliability at the last possible moment, leaving no time for plans, but instead forcing action without a premeditated course of events.

I know, I know, you're probably thinking to yourself, "Kyle this all seems so philosophical and heady. What are you really trying to say?" So in case I lost you with all of my potent, well-articulated, top-notch, extremely sophisticated social proposition, here's the deally-o. Starting Friday night, my car showed signs of beginning the downward spiral of no longer starting. It got closer and closer to not turning on as the weekend went on, so I decided yesterday (Happy Easter!) to take it in to get inspected and hopefully fixed. After just barely starting this morning, I got it into the shop and walked back home (don't worry, the shop is less than a mile away). I got a call about an hour later from the shop asking me to describe the symptoms I had witnessed that caused me to take it in. By mid-afternoon, at the advice of Sarah and Mel (Mel of Bex and Mel's Five-Thousand Watt Rockin' Band), I called the shop to ask for an update. I spoke with Doug who reported that he had been so far unable to get my car to exhibit the symptoms I had reported. At Doug's suggestion, I got Sarah to drive me to the car place (on our way to Pleasant Blends) to see if I could get it to act up the way it had been over the weekend. I got there, it started just fine for me, and after only slight embarrassment, I agreed to leave it there overnight and have him try it in the morning to see if it only had problems after it had been sitting untouched for a longer period.

So now I'm in that vehicular purgatory, waiting to see if I'll be safely able to make my way to Portland and keep on with the plan only a day behind schedule, or if I'll have to move straight into action to salvage as much of my travels as possible. The saving grace of the story is that this is happening in Spokane. At least I'm here, I have a place to stay, people to hang out with, and enough of a general understanding of the city to be able to take solid, rational action without a fully established plan. If I need to junk my car (worst case scenario), I'll be able to figure out how to do so much more easily here than somewhere else. If I need to fly somewhere I was going to drive, I have reliable internet access and transportation to the airport to make that happen. If I get totally frozen for the rest of my trip and absolutely cannot travel, at least I'm already at my final destination. I was going to be here mid-May anyway.

My final note to you, dear reader, take a special moment today to note those many, often overlooked ways that having cars in your life impacts your daily life.